Please note: Shree 420 will be repeated Thursday, November 21. As tonight's screening will be attended by a class, we advise patrons to arrive early. (Box office opens 45 minutes before showtime.)

“Shree 420/Mr. 420 (1955) was based on another script by Abbas (Awara), directed and produced by Raj Kapoor. He stars in it as an honest country youth who comes to Bombay in search of work and quickly discovers that honesty is not much of an asset in the big city. The film's first half is decidedly Chaplinesque: Raju is a wise fool, a variation on Chaplin's underdog tramp. Its second half emphasizes the plight of the jolly have-nots, contrasted with the misdeeds of the evil rich, and is clearly influenced by Frank Capra's social comedies of the 1930s. The film's strongest assets are its catchy score and the romantic scenes with Nargis, especially a lovely idyll in the rain. This mixture of high jinks and social conscience proved a triumph in socialist countries and reinforced Raj Kapoor's popularity in the Soviet Union. The song “Mera Juta Hai Japani/My Shoes Are Made in Japan, but My Heart Was Made in India” swept Russia...(and) the Middle East, and translated into Fiji, was for quite some time at the top of the Fiji Islands' Hit Parade. The Abbas-Kapoor writer-director team, which continued until Bobby (1973), has been compared to that of Zavattini and De Sica.” Elliott Stein